And in my zeal to index all the Oscura Press books, I made them available on Amazon’s Search Inside the Book program too:
Oscura Press books are now on the Google Books site - it’s amazing!
You know, I met a guy named Gary once in New Mexico who was very proud of the fact that he said that he was “working with Google” to get his site indexed. I liked the way he phrased it; it sounded as if he had a direct connection to someone at the Google offices, was working the deal, you know, taking care of business. So I suppose here, I too have finished working with Google to get this indexed. I have become Gary 2.0.
I’ve got a lot of books on my (existential) back-burner, and while editing one of them last month I came across a great line about clouds — which inspired me to write and illustrate a book about antique clouds. It will contain period-piece photographs of clouds from the 1860s to the 1930s, tinted in period colors. Clouds are evanescent, ephemeral, and there’s something tragic & sad & yet upspiring about looking at photos of old clouds, from a time before you were born. I hope this proves to be an interesting book!
I created a tag cloud for Oscura Press; here are some winners!
I read “Wikinomics” while flying back to Seattle from New Mexico, and a quote in the preface inspired this illustration:
One of the problems with print literature is the cost barrier with doing full-color interior spreads; books are often 3 to 4 times more expensive to publish in full color. In compositing an image for The Apocryphon of Oxtan Imlay, which is a story in a new forthcoming book, I collaged images from 1860s Civil War-era newspapers, as well as an illustration from a Quaker magazine circa 1910, a cactus from a Mexican cigar box, and my favorite sun image, which I had originally scanned in wayway back wen I was in Canada, consulting for CIBC on long winter weekends. A red wash made the images striking, but unusable in the interior of a black and white spread, so I post the full color image here.I was inspired by a recent Kara Walker exhibit in Paris, and her black-and-white style of illustration and collage really contributed at a meaningful time to an evolution of style I had been making in illustration. This upcoming book hilights the new style of illustration, but this particular illustration is a throwback to The Dreambook of Skyler Dread. Which — yes — is still unpublished. Being by necessity a full-color book, and the Oscura Press being by dint of its present circumstances unable to justify the cost of publishing of a full-color book, this book will have to wait for a while….
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The Tokharian Tales is a project I first started seven years ago, and was based on a glimpses of life I got around the time when I was working as a consultant for a now-defunct dotcom. I was living in a high-rise condo on King Street in downtown Toronto at the time, and the first glimpse came to me shortly after I had broken my wrist while snowboarding over the weekend; I curtailed my snowboarding, drove home into the city, and spent the night popping aspirin pills and feeling sorry for myself. I was spwarled out onto my couch for hours into the night, and at some point I noticed a woman was still working in her high-rise office across the street, late into a Saturday night, probably striving for a promotion. In that moment, I realized that even into the far future, on that day when men and women start to depart the planet on spaceships for new futures, there will still be unrecognized people working late into the night for promotions, striving for recognition, even though such recognition is cosmically insignificant. I built on this glimpse of life and as people started quitting my dotcom — quitting, well, or getting fired — I wrote a story for each of the people as they left. I wanted to remember them somehow…. |
The feeling of working in a dotcom which was going bust in the hinterlands of Canada felt sad, and as the people gradually faded away and died, it felt more and more what life was probably like for the ancient inhabitants of the far western desert region of China. The Tokharians gradually faded and died as their land became less lush and more deserty, and with the blustry gales of snow in the hinterlands, I myself left like the last King of the Tokharians….I want to thank all my former faded Canadian coworkers at BroadVision, who are remembered inside this novel — I want to thank Sean Fitzpatrick, Lisa Bright, Rendi Wardhana, Martin deLoughery, Eric Yip, Alice Jen, Ben Torres, Sergey Grish, Noelly Bonilla, Adisa Lazetic, Chris Wojtowicz, Tina Wong, Greg Selvitelli, Mark Wainess, Jim Vastbinder, Irina Sedenko, Manisha Arora, Gerrie Weldon, Pauline Wylie, Debra Williams, Bill Groves, Jonathan Pollock, Dale Hsu, Marie Sarrasin, Greg Mezo, Kristina McBlain, and of course Sridhar Narra, who somehow became “Sridhar Joe, Hovercipher Pro!”
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The Tokharian Tales is a project I first started seven years ago, and was based on a glimpses of life I got around the time when I was working as a consultant for a now-defunct dotcom. I was living in a high-rise condo on King Street in downtown Toronto at the time, and the first glimpse came to me shortly after I had broken my wrist while snowboarding over the weekend; I curtailed my snowboarding, drove home into the city, and spent the night popping aspirin pills and feeling sorry for myself. I was spwarled out onto my couch for hours into the night, and at some point I noticed a woman was still working in her high-rise office across the street, late into a Saturday night, probably striving for a promotion. In that moment, I realized that even into the far future, on that day when men and women start to depart the planet on spaceships for new futures, there will still be unrecognized people working late into the night for promotions, striving for recognition, even though such recognition is cosmically insignificant. I built on this glimpse of life and as people started quitting my dotcom — quitting, well, or getting fired — I wrote a story for each of the people as they left. I wanted to remember them somehow…. |
The feeling of working in a dotcom which was going bust in the hinterlands of Canada felt sad, and as the people gradually faded away and died, it felt more and more what life was probably like for the ancient inhabitants of the far western desert region of China. The Tokharians gradually faded and died as their land became less lush and more deserty, and with the blustry gales of snow in the hinterlands, I myself left like the last King of the Tokharians….I want to thank all my former faded Canadian coworkers at BroadVision, who are remembered inside this novel — I want to thank Sean Fitzpatrick, Lisa Bright, Rendi Wardhana, Martin deLoughery, Eric Yip, Alice Jen, Ben Torres, Sergey Grish, Noelly Bonilla, Adisa Lazetic, Chris Wojtowicz, Tina Wong, Greg Selvitelli, Mark Wainess, Jim Vastbinder, Irina Sedenko, Manisha Arora, Gerrie Weldon, Pauline Wylie, Debra Williams, Bill Groves, Jonathan Pollock, Dale Hsu, Marie Sarrasin, Greg Mezo, Kristina McBlain, and of course Sridhar Narra, who somehow became “Sridhar Joe, Hovercipher Pro!”
Check out the Oscura Press books on the Kindle!
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Tokharian Tales
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The Oscura Press is pleased to be the first publisher to release all of its books in the Kindle format — for free! You can read each ebook on your Amazon Kindle by downloading it to your computer by clicking the “download” link, and then copying it with a USB cord onto your Kindle. It’s easy!
| Download A New You |  |
| Download Tokharian Tales |  |
| Download Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole |  |
| Download The Dreambook of Skyler Dread |  |
Instructions:1) Plug Kindle into your computer with a USB cord.2) In a few seconds, your Kindle screen will say it’s in USB drive mode.For Macintosh users:3) Go to your Finder, and you should see a new drive called “Kindle”. Open up the “documents” folder.
